Coming Up Roses: Leila Meacham’s Surprise Best-Seller

The story behind one current best-seller, Leila Meacham’s “Roses,” is quite an exercise in how life’s plans (say, those to embark upon a long and stimulating retirement), can lead to a most unexpected adventure. Meacham, a seventy-one-year-old former English teacher who lives in San Antonio, Texas, decided to finally finish that novel—a thousand yellowed, typewritten pages stuffed away in a closet for over a decade, which now finds itself creeping up the New York Times best-seller list. “Roses” is a Southern epic in the most cinematic sense—plot-heavy and historical, filled with archaic Southern dialect and formality, with love, marriage, war, and death over three generations of the founders of a small, East Texan town, and, of course, a cotton plantation. It clocks in at a grand and gracious six hundred and twenty-four pages. (And sports a dust jacket potpourried with pink and red rose petals and swirly script.)

Meacham spoke with me from her house in Texas recently, and explained: “I just put that beast up on a shelf in my closet, where it gathered dust for a good ten, twelve years, and then one day I was bored, I had nothing to do. I had done everything I wanted after retiring, after my teaching career—You use all of the recipes that you were going to try, volunteer for all of the things you wanted to do—I had done it all.”

In the nineteen-eighties, Meacham wrote three other romance novels, but only in order to settle a bet with a friend. Meacham thought that it would be easy to capitalize on what she saw as a facile genre. “I read a bunch of them, and I thought to myself, how very implausible! Because the conflicts in these stories, well, they could be settled over a cup of coffee at Denny’s coffee shop.” Meacham won the bet—sort of: the books were published, but soon went out of print. In the eighties, too, Meacham began work on “Roses,” but often thought it would never be completed. She almost threw it out once, when moving to a new house, with all those clothes she knew she would never wear again. But her husband suggested she keep it—“Oh, no,” he said, “You spent a year on that, you never know.” (Let us now doff our caps to each Mr. Meacham and every Mrs. Nabokov).

With the success of “Roses,” she has permitted herself to assume the work of writer, and to sit down each day in solitude at a desk with her next book. “I’m willing to devote the time required to this new novel so I can get it out of my system,” she said. “Because this one just worries around inside me—far more than the other one.”